Analyzing the Efficiency of Your Service Advisors, in Review
The customer’s fresh repair order is placed by the service adviser.
Your customers and your service department are connected through your service advisers, who also bring in fresh repair orders and earnings. In light of this, your service department is probably underperforming as well.
Your entire service department will run more efficiently and (ideally) at a larger profit margin if you know exactly how to gauge their success and what you can do to improve it.
In this article, we’ll outline the five crucial metrics you need to track and offer five tips to help your service advisors perform better overall.
Significant Service Advisor Metrics
You can monitor who is performing well and who isn’t quite up to par by setting benchmarks. Get set, go, and measure.
1. Repair orders per advisor as compared to quoted repairs
a straightforward but useful metric. You can learn several things by keeping track of how many repair orders your service advisors write each day in comparison to the number of bids they provide to clients:
* How well your service advisors can turn quotes into actual sales
* If your service department struggles to keep up with the number of repair orders your sales advisors are writing each day,
* If your service representatives are not writing enough repair orders, they are leaving money on the table, and leaving your technicians idle
2. Hours Sold For Each Repair Request
Even though it’s not a metric that solely applies to advisors, this measurement can show whether advisors routinely undercut the price they quote clients, pick and choose which orders and appointments to accept, or generally handle repair orders improperly. While many just divide the number of invoiced hours by the number of repair orders, a more precise calculation would look something like this:
HPRO formula: (labor sales divided by RO count)/effective labor rate
3. Add-Ons for Point of Sale
Your service advisers should be operating as both salespeople AND customer consultants, recommending additional services that could benefit your customers, whether it’s a tire rotation or an oil change.
Customer Contentment
Your service advisors must provide each car owner with a wonderful customer experience because they are client-facing employees. You run a significant risk of having a bad review about your service department posted online if they are being overly pushy or just plain nasty to clients.
4. Bonus: Your service advisers will find it simple to surprise and excite consumers when they work with a renewable benefits supplier like SimpSocial. All of a sudden, that straightforward oil change includes the assurance of round-the-clock roadside help, tire protection from potential road hazards, and emergency transportation.
5. Retention of clients
Even if your customers are completely satisfied, they can decide to get their car repaired somewhere else. Customer retention has been shown to directly affect your bottom line, so it could be time to hire new advisers if your advisors aren’t focused on keeping EVERY customer.
Simple ways to assess how successful your advisors are at retaining clients:
Before leaving the store, how many customers have their next visit scheduled? How many customers have received emails or messages reminding them to make an appointment? (If utilizing SimpSocial or an additional retention program with incentives.) How well advisors outline the potential renewal benefits associated with routine maintenance and the timeframe for when those benefits expire
Enhancing the Performance of Service Advisors
It’s time to examine how your service advisors may boost their metrics and overall contribution to your service department now that you’ve established a benchmark for performance.
Constant Instruction
Don’t let the initial week of training be the only time your service advisors receive instruction. Your service advisers need to have the training necessary to do their jobs—and do them well—whether it’s to help them hone their sales methods or get them up to speed on a new service you’re offering.
Specify metrics and target goals.
Your service advisers are probably not achieving your expectations if you haven’t set specific objectives or quotas for them to meet. Based on past performance and room for development, establish new benchmarks.
Establish a rule for discounts and a transparent pricing structure.
It is a slippery slope to lower profitability to let service advisors decide when and where to apply discounts at their own discretion. Make explicit instructions for when and how a discount should be applied, as well as pricing criteria that your service advisors can adhere to.
This will not only make it easy for your service advisors to estimate customer costs, but it will also guarantee your department’s maximum profitability.
Define the capacity of the service department and the open lines of communication
The efficiency and profitability of your department may suffer if your service advisors and technicians are out of whack. Make sure that every service adviser is aware of the department’s daily maximum capacity and that they are in constant contact with the technicians in case anything needs to be changed.
Implement a mechanism for customer feedback
If your service representatives never receive feedback, it can be difficult to improve their customer service abilities. Your service advisors can learn from their mistakes in the past by using a customer service or feedback tool. Options consist of:
* Recorded customer care conversations
* Post-service client polls
Your service advisers are probably one of your clients’ primary lines of contact, if not the only one. By monitoring and enhancing their performance, you can maintain a satisfied customer base and maximize your revenue.
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